Salary inequity by gender still an issue at Western Michigan University; pay adjustments coming

Lisa Minnick, vice president of the WMU chapter of AAUP, addressed the Board of Trustees at its June meeting.Yvonne Zipp | MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette

KALAMAZOO, MI - Female professors at Western Michigan University earn 4 percent less on average than their male colleagues. By the end of summer, the pay of as many as 300 of the women will be going up.

The amount of the increase and the number of female professors who receive one will be determined over the next month, according to Provost Timothy Greene, who said the salary adjustments should be finalized by the first paycheck of the academic year. He declined to say how much money would be allocated, but said that the amount would be more than $200,000.

The salary adjustments, which are designed to rectify cases of salary inequity based on gender, are the culmination of a 2008 collective bargaining agreement between WMU and its professors union.

Gender inequity in pay isn't unique to WMU -- or the field of higher education -- and experts said WMU is one of a growing number of North American universities taking steps to address the fact that women tend to be paid less than men.

"We recognize it is time now to take a step back and look specifically at gender equity and address issues," said Greene.

There are a number of reasons female professors tend to earn less than their male counterparts, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors in Washington, which does an annual survey of faculty pay.

Women are less likely to be in senior positions, such as dean or chair of a department, and are less likely to be full professors. Society still expects women to take on more of a family's caregiving duties, which means more women tend to be in non-tenure track positions, said Curtis.

There also are fewer women in disciplines such as math, computers and engineering, which pay the most, and more in the less-well-paying humanities departments.

And some of the pay disparity, he added, hinges on the fact that women historically were offered less money than men and tend to be uncomfortable negotiating for more.

"It's a big issue in higher education," said Curtis.

Timothy Greene

A 2011 study by Sibson Consulting, commissioned as a result of the 2008 contract with WMU's chapter of the American Association of University Professors, found that female professors, on average, earned $3,612 less than their male colleagues -- a difference of 4 percent.

But female professors interviewed sounded frustrated rather than vindicated about the salary adjustments.

They say that deadlines have been missed, the rules to determine which professors will get adjustments are arbitrary and that the process unfairly excludes entire departments, as well as tenure-track professors, administrators and female administrative staff. Some argued that the clerical staff are among the most underpaid employees on campus.

"Female faculty from every college have come to us with serious reservations," about the process, Lisa Minnick, vice president of WMU's professors union, told the Board of Trustees at its meeting June 12. "Many faculty members felt it pitted them against one another."

For its part, WMU's administration says that it is tackling a long-standing injustice in good faith and that eliminating the problem of gender inequity on campus can't be solved by one raise. It will require a multi-year, multi-pronged effort, said Greene in an interview.

"We all agree there are some things out there that we, as a good steward of society, need to address," said Greene. The disagreements arise, he said, when it gets down to "how we address them."

A stipulation that professors must be shown to have merit to receive an adjustment has raised the most hackles, those interviewed said -- in essence making the women prove they are worthy of being treated fairly.

"It's presuming that some people were discriminated against deservingly," said Susan Freeman, chair of the Gender and Women's Studies department.

"That's ridiculous. That would raise my hackles, too," said Beth Sullivan, senior associate for Advocacy & Policy at the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "They need to be making up for past lack of compensation. Current merit should have nothing to do with making up for the past."

Greene explained that "merit" in this case is not intended to be a major obstacle to female professors receiving salary adjustments. He said that he intended that it apply in cases, for example, where a professor has disciplinary action pending against them.

Freeman's department is one of two -- along with the Bronson School of Nursing -- whose professors may not see any salary adjustments under the current plan, because they have no male faculty to be compared to.

The inherent irony in feminists being excluded from a measure to deal with gender inequity has not been lost on the professors of that department.

"It's a bit demoralizing," said Freeman.

Greene said he was aware of the situation but had not yet come up with a solution.

"I don't have complete clarity in my own mind how we'll address this," said Greene.

WMU's chapter of the AAUP also said it takes issue with the length of the process.

"The study has been complete for over two years," said Minnick, who spearheaded the union's efforts. "We didn't even start this process until 2013."

In a statement emailed to deans Feb. 4, WMU laid out the guiding principles and process of the pay equity adjustments. Among those: the analysis would be exclusive to members of the AAUP's bargaining unit, would focus only on tenured faculty, comparisons would be made within academic departmental units and "all other things being equal, individual cases will be reviewed to see if the person is meritorious for an increase."

Minnick said that, after a joint committee failed to come to agreement after a year, the guidelines were drawn up without input from WMU's AAUP.

On Feb. 25, the AAUP issued a letter outlining its concerns with the guidelines but saying it would not stand in the way of the process "despite our serious reservations about it."

"We have further explained that we cannot agree to the summary disqualification of any individual faculty member, nor to the exclusion of entire departments or units within departments, for what appear to be arbitrary and specious reasons," the letter read. "We have also questioned the conflation of equity with merit, which obliges faculty members to prove that they are sufficiently meritorious not to continue to be discriminated against ... The WMU-AAUP believes that such exclusions and conditions risk exacerbating discrimination on our campus rather than redressing it in any meaningful way."

"My advice to my female colleagues: Whatever you're offered, take it. It's not going to be enough," said Minnick. "I'm hoping people see some adjustments, but I'm bracing for what happens when those are announced."

Greene said that this summer's adjustments are intended as a first step -- not WMU's entire answer to the issue of gender inequity.

"This is the first time we've done this. And we are working our way through a process that will be as fair and equitable as possible. I am pleased that Western can address this issue," said Greene. "We're taking our own path that we think works best for Western."

Salary adjustments have become more common at universities in the United States and Canada since 1999, when MIT released its Reports on the Status of Women in Science. In Michigan, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was the first to offer its female professors a salary adjustment. Among the public universities that have offered at least some of their female professors equity adjustments: the University of Maine system, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Gender equity is certainly a significant issue at universities all over the country," said Curtis. "It is the case that women, especially women that have been on the faculty for a while, have legitimate grounds for feeling that they've been disadvantaged every step of the way."

Most recently, the University of British Columbia in Canada offered all 880 of its female professors a 2 percent raise in February. That across-the-board approach is rare -- among the 17 universities UBC studied, only one, the University of Manitoba, offered all its female professors an adjustment, it said in its executive summary.

Minnick and Freeman both said that many professors would have preferred an across-the-board increase, as a gesture of good faith, and then have some of the more extreme salary disparities dealt with on an individual basis.

"Most of the people I've talked to, women or men, say there's a necessity to address those really extreme cases, but there's a desire not to exacerbate tensions that have arisen around salary inequity," said Freeman.

With a limited pool of resources, though, Greene said that it didn't make sense to offer an increase in those cases where a female professor is the most highly compensated in a department, when there are cases where a female professor is paid thousands of dollars less than her male colleagues.

"I could do that in a memo to HR and be done with this. That's not what Western is all about," said Greene. "Our faculty are individuals. We want to look at individuals and make sure we're doing the best by individuals. We're trying to do the best by everybody."

While 4 percent was the average, according to WMU's 2011 study, in individual departments, the discrepancies can be even greater. In the geography department, for example, there are no full female professors. The two female associate professors' salaries are within a few hundred dollars of each other, but the highest paid female professor makes more than $7,000 less than the lowest paid male associate professor -- a difference of 10 percent. (All salaries are as of November 2012, according to WMU's website.)

That amount compounds over years, both Minnick and Greene pointed out. The discrepancy also impacts retirement contributions, as well as things like how much a professor is paid for teaching a summer session.

In the department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, there is only one female associate professor, who is the lowest paid in her department, making $5,400 less than the next highest paid associate professor and more than $12,100 less than the average departmental salary for associates. In the department of electrical engineering, the lone female professor makes $9,000 to $12,000 less than several of the male associate professors.

"I do not believe that this is a one-year fix problem. This is an issue we need to look at multiple times over multiple years," said Greene. "This is an important issue to Western and I am personally committed to continue to address this issue."

"When we finish this first round of analysis, we will have a much better idea of what will have to be done in the future," he added.

That has been true at other universities that have tried to address the issue, Curtis said.

"It definitely has been the case at lots of universities that this is an issue that requires several years to address," said Curtis. "The problems didn't develop overnight ... You can't have a solution you figure out in one year."

Yvonne Zipp is a reporter for the Kalamazoo Gazette, a part of the MLive Media Group. You can reach her at yzipp@mlive.com or 269-365-8639.